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AUNE Alumni and Faculty are Key Players in Monadnock International Film Festival

Alumni and faculty from Antioch University New England (AUNE) play important parts in the first Monadnock International Film Festival to be held April 4-6, in Keene.

Jaime Contois, MS ’03, a local community organizer is a member of the festival’s board of directors. Abigail Abrash Walton,director of the Center for Academic Innovation and assistant to the president for sustainability and social justice, and Emily Hague, MS ’05, stewardship manager for the Monadnock Conservancy, are members of the festival’s advisory board. And Cynthia Sebian-Lander and Jocelyn Bourgault, students in the Advocacy for Social Justice and Sustainability concentration, helped get the festival rolling three years ago as a project for AUNE’s Advocacy Clinic.

The festival’s theme this year is Movies Matter. We’re bringing local, national, and international films that demonstrate inspiration and how we can be transformative, Contois said.

To kick off the festival, filmmaker Victoria Mudd, MAT ’71, AUNE’s Alumna-Scholar-in-Residence, will speak on Images of Indians: From Reel to Real at 7 p.m., Wednesday, April 3, in AUNE’s Community Room. This Speaker Series event is free and open to the public.

Mudd, a professor of media studies at Pitzer College, Claremont, California, has produced several documentary films, including Broken Rainbow, an exploration of the Hope-Navajo Land Dispute, which won an Academy Award in 1985. She also made Tibet: Cry of the Snow Lion.

AUNE donates cash award for first Jonathan Daniels Award to Ken BurnsA highlight will be presentation of the festival’s first Jonathan Daniels Award to film-maker Ken Burns for his 2012 documentary The Central Park Five, which explores the 1989 case of five black and Latino teenagers wrongly convicted of raping a white woman in New York City’s Central Park. It will be screened April 6 at the Colonial Theater.

The Jonathan Daniels Award is presented to a filmmaker whose work embraces the spirit of Jonathan Daniels through its social consciousness, and which tells stories of hope, redemption, and the triumph of the human spirit. AUNE is providing the $1,000 cash award for the prize.